Posts tagged with: Cafe Hayek

As we approach Labor Day here in the U.S., it’s good to ponder “work”, that most ordinary feat nearly all of us perform every day. We get up, get dressed, and do our jobs. It’s quite simple…and quite amazing. There is a lovely reflection on this from Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek:

Ponder this astonishing fact: Each and every thing that we consume today in market societies is something that requires the coordinated efforts of millions of people, yet each of us is able to command possession and use of these things in exchange for only a small fraction of our work time.

Why aren’t more people blown away with the pure splendor and marvelousness of it all?!

Don Boudreaux and Mark J. Perry at Cafe Hayek are here to tell you: life in the 1950s for America’s middle class is not the wonderland we might like to think.

A favorite “progressive” trope is that America’s middle class has stagnated economically since the 1970s. One version of this claim, made by Robert Reich, President Clinton’s labor secretary, is typical: “After three decades of flat wages during which almost all the gains of growth have gone to the very top,” he wrote in 2010, “the middle class no longer has the buying power to keep the economy going.”

This trope is spectacularly wrong.

They point out that 60 years ago, the average middle-class home spent over 50% of its disposable income on food, utilities, rent/mortgage, etc. Today, that figure is closer to 30%. To prove the point that we don’t have a stagnant middle class stuck in some sort of economic time warp, Boudreaux has started a fun series, using commercials from the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s to remind us where we were and where our memories may be leading us astray. Like many of us, Boudreaux learned to type on an electric typewriter. It was state-of-art, the best of the best. Do you want to swap your iPad for it?